Ant chutney, anyone?

THE FOOD CLUB

In Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu, he documents the craze prevalent several decades ago for “foreign foods”, where the Indian hostess who served cubes of yellow Kraft cheese was ahead of those of her friends who could only afford Amul.

My childhood memories include limp, salty asparagus and canned fruit cocktail — always served as a special treat for honoured guests. These days, it’s hard to find truly exotic food. Haggis and blood pudding? Available in cans, and if the idea of eating stuffed sheep’s intestines bothers you, reflect on the fact that the Scots think eating goat’s meat is barbaric. Escargots, foie gras, frog’s legs, smoked eel, durian, Kobe beef? Slightly recherché, and again, too easily available.

Polling my foodie friends was a lot of fun.
“Red ant chutney in Orissa.”
“Horseflesh.”
“Scorpions on a stick, in Beijing.”
“Lizard wine. (Made by steeping rice wine in a vat full of geckos, the recipe is silent on the issue of whether lizard droppings are an essential or optional addition.)”
“Natto (powerfully pungent, sticky concoction made from fermented soybeans).”
“Dog meat. Not a dog I knew personally, of course.”
“Salak (also known as the snake fruit).”
“Live baby cobra, rendered drunk on wine before you let it slide down your throat.”

And so it goes, from brain curry to grasshoppers, cherimoyas to pickled cactus pads. The rules of the extreme eating game emerge as we talk. Relatively few vegetables and fruits make the list, and the ones that do could go from being exotic to humdrum in a single season. (Remember when broccoli was exotic?) Dragon fruit, a cousin of the once-exotic, now common kiwi fruit, was wildly unusual for a brief season two years ago, and is now boringly familiar.

To make it, vegetables and fruits have to have a slight yuck factor. The debate over durian, for example, will never let up: some love its creamy, aged cheese flavour, some never get over its knockout aroma. I can handle durian, but I can’t deal with natto — to me, natto tastes like eating fermented, sticky strings of snot that have been marinated in used cat litter. My Japanese friends shake their heads in pity and tell me I’m missing out.

Meat and fish polarise people the most. In order to qualify as suitably exotic, these dishes have to be rare, to push the frontiers of cruelty, or to push the taste buds to within an inch of revolt. There are food myths: eating live monkey brains is probably an urban myth. But most of the dishes people discussed have a built-in flinch factor: bull’s testicles, rooster cockscombs, pig’s snouts are exactly the opposite of safe, processed meat that doesn’t remind you of the live animal at all.

Taste is almost secondary. Snake meat tastes boringly like chicken, if stringier; horse meat is slightly sweetish, red ant chutney is peppery and scorpions are crunchy. The lure of these foods is that they’re almost taboo — it’s the old sheep’s eyeball trick. You don’t eat a sheep’s eyeball for the taste (gelatinous, slightly oily and crunchy, since you ask) but for the privilege of saying you’ve done it.

Given the rules of extreme eating, would there be an ultimate dish, one so extreme that it couldn’t actually be eaten at all? We thought about it, and taking into account the rules of the game — it must be taboo or near-taboo, it must be hard to find, and it must be slightly disgusting — we came up with the perfect item. Lightly braised human foetus, but not just any foetus — this would have to be a foetus sourced from a tribe threatened by extinction. Anthony Bourdain, let’s see you eat that.

(nilanjanasroy@gmail.com)